It’s Friday, which means it’s time to take our weekly trip with the ghost of technology past. This week we’ll be checking out some top headlines from March 2000. Here’s what Geek.com covered nine years ago…

Back in March ’00 we finally got some details on what Microsoft’s game console, the “X-box”, would be like. Bill Gates told us that we’d see a “600 MHz chip from Intel, the X-Chip graphics processor co-designed by Microsoft and nVidia, 64MB of RAM, a 4x DVD drive, an 8GB hard drive, [and] Broadband ‘Net access capability”. Pretty exciting stuff back then, though as Sam pointed out, the console wasn’t slated until fall 2001, about a year and a half later. It was ultimately released on November 15th, 2001 and went on to sell about 24 million units (according to Wikipedia).

This week in history Intel finally hit the 1000MHz mark. It’s nothing now, we have cell phone processors running at nearly that speed, but it was huge back in the day. The 1GHZ Pentium III chips were selling for $990, considerably cheaper than AMD’s 1GHz Athlon chips that were selling for about $1290. It’s interesting to see how Intel has kept that $1000 price point for it’s high-end (and Extreme Edition) processors over the years.

This week Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet was released on ebook for $2.50. It’s amazing how relevant this is considering the recent release of the Kindle 2, where King had an exclusive title (Ur) and appeared at Amazon’s press conference.

That’s it for this edition of This Week on Geek! We’ll be back next Friday, but you can always browse the Geek.com archives on your own.